THE BANK OF ENGLISH

The Bank of English is not a text, it is a hypertext: a fluid corpus or database of texts at one time totalling some 500m words. As well as providing information on the meaning and usage of words, because of its size it can also be used to find factual information in a similar way to the internet, operating as an encyclopedia as well as a dictionary.

With computerisation, information has passed from people’s mouths, ears  and bookshelves, and seems to have disappeared from the physical world altogether. It resides outside our brains and bodies, embedded instead in a massive infrastructure used to maintain it, as well as on the surfaces of the tons of paper needed to give it a physical form.

I chose the word corpus to represent the body, and by extension the Bank of English. In the human body is the brain, which is what makes sense of the information in the Bank of English, that filters out irrelevant material and constructs meaning. The brain is often misleadingly likened to a computer, and its interface with the world – the body – is all too often perceived as incomplete, inconvenient or irrelevant hardware in an age of deincarnation. However, the corpus is nothing without the brain, and the brain is nothing without the body. In order to survive and grow we need to take care of  brain and body.